Zendesk Support allows SlicePay to easily serve over 150K customers

Access to credit in India can still be difficult, especially for students. Financial-technology startup, SlicePay, is on a mission to change this by giving students credit to buy products such as laptops and mobile phones, enabling them to pay in monthly installments.

The founders, Deepak Malhotra and Rajan Bajaj, found that while they were at college, the payment channels they had available were inaccessible or carried lengthy wait times, which led them to establish SlicePay in late 2015.

“Most students are unable to pay for more expensive items in cash, up front. This is where SlicePay steps in, giving them access to simple, flexible payment options they can use. We provide a credit line of up to Rs 60,000 to students from over 300 colleges in Bangalore and Chennai, and are planning to expand to more cities before the end of this calendar year,” said Suhas Reddy, director of operations at SlicePay.

When a student searches for a product, the platform provides monthly payment options alongside related down payment details. Students can choose their preferred payment option and use their ‘student ID’ to purchase the product. SlicePay might require additional information such as phone number of a classmate or a parent.

SlicePay had previously selected Intercom to help with the growing number of enquiries from students eager to set up accounts. “We found that most of our students liked to use live chat to contact us, but they expected immediate responses, which put a huge amount of pressure on our customer support team,” said Reddy. Intercom didn’t offer SlicePay adequate visibility into how long it was taking the team to respond to enquiries or reporting on how they could improve the customer support they provided.

“The quality of our customer support is extremely important to us. It is what sets us apart in our market and we needed a solution that would help us centralise our support function, give us greater visibility and accountability and ultimately help us to provide a better service to our customers.”

In March 2017, the decision was made to migrate to Zendesk Support to manage all customer support. SlicePay put an emphasis on enabling customers to self-serve and invested in building a help centre to answer common questions in real time.

“We’ve only been using Zendesk for a month but the change has been significant. We have transitioned from Intercom chat to Zendesk Support and Guide.”

“I’ve been so impressed by the analytics data available already. I can see how long our agents are taking to respond to queries and can, therefore, help to manage their workloads more effectively. This data is invaluable as we grow because I know when we need to bring on more customer agents, which we’re doing over the next couple of months,” continued Reddy.

The number of apps that integrate into Zendesk Support has certainly been an eye-opener to Reddy and his team.

“Round Robin, the ticket assignment app, has been a particular favourite. I just go to the app store and have a look at what’s available for us to use. It saves me bothering my busy tech team, to be honest. We can try them ourselves and use the ones that work best for our team.”

And while SlicePay is currently focused on optimizing their customer experience with Support and Guide, they’re already considering adding Zendesk Chat later in the year.